Wonderful movies like this, so few in number, make me wish I was a film instructor.
I would ask the class to write a screenplay based on a widower on a commuter train coping with his loss as his seatmate, a young tough, betrays every malevolent, tasteless, insensitive thought that any horrible person could summon - and who thinks very highly of himself, as such people do.
Our widower, by contrast, is resolutely calm and empathetic, striving to see the world as others do, as if that were some kind of national duty or, closer to the point, what it takes to be a man. A real man.
Packed into a runtime of just 27m, and working with a budget of only L140,000 (with an assist for which I'm grateful from the Irish Film Board), the future director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri reveals why he's destined to only make brilliant movies. With this movie, he started at the top, and has stayed there.
McDonagh did not, of course, come out of nowhere. What you see in this picture is decades of experience writing and producing for the London stage. Still, films are a different medium, and this movie isn't the least stagey. At times you think you're watching a Bond flick, waiting for the next impossible thing to happen. A thriller, a dark comedy, a touch of film noir, and a novice director who has to be one of the quickest studies on how to make superb movies in cinema history.
I would ask the class to write a screenplay based on a widower on a commuter train coping with his loss as his seatmate, a young tough, betrays every malevolent, tasteless, insensitive thought that any horrible person could summon - and who thinks very highly of himself, as such people do.
Our widower, by contrast, is resolutely calm and empathetic, striving to see the world as others do, as if that were some kind of national duty or, closer to the point, what it takes to be a man. A real man.
Packed into a runtime of just 27m, and working with a budget of only L140,000 (with an assist for which I'm grateful from the Irish Film Board), the future director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri reveals why he's destined to only make brilliant movies. With this movie, he started at the top, and has stayed there.
McDonagh did not, of course, come out of nowhere. What you see in this picture is decades of experience writing and producing for the London stage. Still, films are a different medium, and this movie isn't the least stagey. At times you think you're watching a Bond flick, waiting for the next impossible thing to happen. A thriller, a dark comedy, a touch of film noir, and a novice director who has to be one of the quickest studies on how to make superb movies in cinema history.